Since the first spark was lit in Southport, condemnation of the rioters has largely centred on their identity as “far-Right thugs”. Indeed, some experts, including the former head of British counter-terrorism policing, have gone as far as to call the …
Is Britain heading for civil war?
Unusual for the time of year, the radiant sun was setting over the picturesque city. It was the early evening of 5 April 1992, and while some Sarajevo’s residents were listening to the opera, lovers could be seen strolling along …
How Britain ignored its ethnic conflict
Following the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, the aftermath, like those of other recent terrorist atrocities, was marked by what later revealed to be a coordinated British government policy of “controlled spontaneity”. Pre-planned vigils and inter-faith events were rolled out, …
Ramaphosa has slain the Rainbow Nation
A disrespectful Afrikaans expression refers to a person seeing their gat or backside. It means to get one’s comeuppance. In last week’s South African 2024 general elections, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) saw its gat and the only remaining …
Is black trauma porn over?
Monk Ellison, a struggling black college professor, writes My Pafology as a prank: the stereotype-laden novel is a clapback at the publishers who equate “Black stories” with tropes of poverty, brutality, and violence.
But the joke, as it turns out, …
Gen Z’s radical race politics
It’s a dreary day in a provincial English town. A tracksuit-wearing teenage boy affecting an exaggerated version of the “Jafaican”, which has replaced Cockney as the capital’s working-class dialect, asks a similarly dressed individual: “What nationality is the best to …
Why women and minorities are buying guns
Guns have been tied to American identity ever since the nation declared independence. But from Buffalo Bill to Rambo, the rugged, gun-toting individual has been mythologised by the gun lobby almost exclusively as a white male. And this myth was …
The Asian-American class war
In the metropolises of the West, shops that sell bubble tea — or boba, as it is commonly known — have proliferated over the past few years, a microcosm of the boom in East Asian cultural exports. At the same …
Affirmative action’s fatal flaw
Say what you like about progressives in America and their nebulous calls for “racial equity”, but they got one thing right: college admissions have always been a zero-sum game. With limited places at the prestigious universities and tens of millions …
The fantasy of dating a Republican
More than 20 years before the advent of Tinder, an MTV show called Singled Out offered an unwittingly prescient insight into the dangers of algorithmic dating. The premise was simple: a dating pool of 50 potential suitors milled around in …
South Africa’s infinite humiliation
Olive Schreiner, the South African author of The Story of an African Farm, surveyed her Edwardian society as an impoverished exile in London in a letter to a lifelong friend, John X Merriman. “A dead pall rests over the whole …
The betrayal of white working-class men
Cards on the table: I’m a rampant opponent of white, bourgeois, male privilege. Events such as the Coronation, or another Biden-Trump stand-off, pull this lunacy into sharp focus. Yes, these ludicrous and deranged media-driven circuses may have little to do …
Edward Blum: My battle against affirmative action
Is it all over for affirmative action? Edward Blum, a 71-year-old conservative legal strategist, has spent decades campaigning against “race-conscious” university admissions policies (also known as positive discrimination) in the United States, which, he has argued, disadvantage high-achieving Asian Americans. …
Race is a status game
Growing up the son of a Nigerian father and Polish mother in Lagos, I often wondered what the real root of racial inequality was. Watching movies about the US civil rights movement with my father it was clear to me …
Stop trying to make ‘digital blackface’ happen
Sweet Brown is wearing a tie-dyed tank top, a scarf knotted around her short dark hair. She’s talking to the camera like it’s someone she knows intimately, telling the story of her brush with death: “I said, oh lord Jesus, …